


Expensive Mistakes

by xheartxfingers



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Bandom - Freeform, Depression, Eating Disorders, Hiatus, M/M, RPF, Slash, Soul Punk, m/m - Freeform, mental health
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 19:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13643004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xheartxfingers/pseuds/xheartxfingers
Summary: Alone in his hotel room during the Soul Punk era tour, Patrick reflects...(This is the first of more I hope... if you guys like it!)





	Expensive Mistakes

5 AM, half-drunk and head spinning in another hotel room, in another city he would not remember, Patrick Stump lay splayed in a sweaty tangle of limbs and bed-sheets. In his head, the needle scratched and skipped on a recorded litany of his mistakes. And boy oh boy, wasn’t there enough of those to keep him awake until sunrise.

The Hiatus. The Album. Stepping into the spotlight. Baring his soul, his whole truth – only to

find that no one else wanted to know. It stung, just a little.

The tour crawled on. Night after night. City after city. Town after town.

He’d lost all heart for it once the reviews started rolling in. It was one thing to get up on

stage and bare your soul if you believed what you were saying was worth damn – but now, the whole endeavor just seemed embarrassing. But still, there were contractual obligations to fulfill, managers waving pieces of paper, stained with his spider-scrawl signature. He couldn’t pull out, even if he wanted to – and there were many times he had. 

The nest egg was all but gone. All that money wasted on promoting something he no longer

believed in – himself. He was broke, in more ways than one. He considered going back to school once all this was over, learning a trade, living an honest, humble, miserable life like everyone else.

The Hiatus had been his idea. He was tired of stale pop punk riffs and harmonized hollering.

He wanted to create something that was simply _him_. He’d felt himself drifting away from the band for the last few years. They had been so young when they started out. It was natural, he assured himself, for people to grow apart. As an artist, he no longer found expression in the pop punk melodies and teen angst lyrics. He was tired of it all. He was tired of not being taken seriously, of being the fat guy in the shadow of the sex symbol.  The sound no longer belonged to him. The songs were a parody of what he thought other people wanted to hear.

He’d wanted to go it alone, to create something that was truly his own.

_Soul Punk_ was all him – and they _hated_ it.

The critics had sneered. Fall Out Boy fans turned up to his shows just to let him know they thought he sucked on his own. Now that was dedication. Purchasing a $100 ticket to a show you didn’t want to go to, simply out of spite.

He hadn’t anticipated the response, but there was nothing he could do to change it. And now he was stuck, night after night, city after city, singing the same songs that were killing his career.  He had lost friends, burnt bridges, become a scorched earth of a man, a desert of goodwill in his attempts to free himself from the success that no longer seemed like a blessing. He’d felt trapped, creatively constrained – but that was better than what was left to him now.

He longed to sleep, to shut his eyes and for the screaming between his ears to stop. The voice that had been whispering in his ear since high school had acquired a megaphone somewhere between the first bad review and the last bad gig. It told him he was a failure. He wasn’t a real musician. He was an idiot who’d thrown everything way on an inglorious ego trip. It wasn’t just his career he cared about – it was the friends he’d lost along the way. He hadn’t seen Pete in months. Not so much as a phone call. And it was his fault. At first he hadn’t wanted to speak to him. After years of living in close quarters, bunked up in hotel rooms and tour buses, Patrick needed space. But after a month or so, he began to miss the guy. His irritating laugh, his complete disregard for personal boundaries, his constant need for tactile stimulation, with his hands all over Patrick’s face and hair, simply for the sensation. But he couldn’t be the one to pick up the phone first. And now... well now, it was too fucking humiliating.

So well done buddy, he congratulated himself, you’ve fucked up everything now.

And he was _fat_.

He knew that.

Sixty pounds down and still... there was too fucking much of him.

Sometimes, on nights like this, it helped to fixate on the one problem he could fix.

 


End file.
